Humanity battles sea monsters using robots that can’t swim — could it get any sillier?

The concept for Pacific Rim is that monsters come out of the sea and
are smashed to death by giant human-controlled robots, and that’s pretty
much it. It has no plot, no script, no mystery and no discernible
characters, unless you are impressed by the preposterous Stacker Pentecost
(Idris Elba), a rogue general with two rows of Starbucks staff achievement
stars across his epaulettes. The film has sprung not, as you might imagine,
from a tweet (“Monsters! Robots! Blarg”), but from the pulsing mind of
Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth and its bastard ­children,
Hellboy and Hellboy II.

Del Toro is clearly proud of his storyline, or at least there’s a long,
flatulent prologue that reveals the idiotic extent of “the Jaeger
programme”, a post-apocalyptic military strategy in which huge robots
(Jaeger) have been designed to kill the huge monsters (kaiju) that have
started twirling mysteriously out of